The Problem With AEW That Nobody Wants To Talk About

Either the talent sucks, for their inability to get booked regularly, or the promotion sucks for their inability to recognise the talent. Somebody is telling on themselves. It's thin, damning pretext with which to turn heel, but it's invariably a failure of a move. Pissing and moaning is not effective heat. Beating the sh*t out of babyfaces as a credible threat is effective heat. Nobody ever gets over by complaining about how they are used. This counterproductive, WWE-specific development is dog sh*t. WWE has descended into a strange meta landscape - a sort of onscreen anti-promotion that acts as the barrier to stardom when it is meant to function as the precise opposite. AEW can't ever be this. More than anything - the tiresome debates of "sport" and the like - what puts AEW over as the alternative is that it's the good promotion that rewards worthy talent.

In the case of Lance Archer, a tremendous talent, it should not go without mention, AEW has stumbled onto the problem of booking a monster in one weekly episodic territory. They don't want him to win all the time, but his aura suffers more than most when he doesn't. He's become a directionless and agitated tweener as a result. Perhaps this is another case of writing AEW off too early. This mysterious storyline with Sting might result in Archer dethroning Darby Allin and mounting a monster of a run with the TNT Championship. Or perhaps this very week, he'll target Ethan Page and Scorpio Sky - as teased on last week's Dynamite - for pissing and moaning about their spot. But it's a bad, indirect indictment of the company that Archer is saying the things that he is saying, because the subtext - subtext that some wrestling fans are in fact smart enough to pick up - is that AEW doesn't know how to book the monster.

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